reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (03/09/86)
Since mod.recipes has started going to non-English-speaking countries, I've
been getting comments that some of the recipes are very difficult to
understand. I've been thinking hard about how to fix that--and I've been
editing things like "1 can of soup" into "13 oz of commercial soup
concentrate--one U.S. can".
Tonight I'm going to an Indonesian potluck dinner, and since I've never
cooked Indonesian food before I spent some time cruising the local Asian
groceries, looking for special ingredients. One of them is tamarind sauce; I
ended up buying a bottle of Fillipino tamarind sauce and some dried tamarind
to try to make my own sauce.
On the side of the Fillipino tamarind sauce bottle is the following recipe.
If your cooking experience is anything like mine, you'll probably find this
recipe as baffling as I did. I had to look up virtually every word (I knew
the meaning of only "onion" and "tomatoes" from the ingredient list).
DIRECTIONS: measure 2 liters of water. Add 5 tbsp of biglang
sinigang. Mix well and bring to a boil with your choice of fish
or shrimps. Drop in gabi, labanos, sitaw, tomatoes, and onion.
When almost done add kangkong or camote tops. Add one piece of
long green sili, 1 tsp of salt, and 1 Tbsp of monosodium
glutamate.
I wonder if this is what our American recipes read like to our friends in
Holland and Norway and France?
--
Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid
Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA